


Worklace

by 11dishwashers



Series: Severance [2]
Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: M/M, Other, teenagers au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 22:04:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14246694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/11dishwashers/pseuds/11dishwashers
Summary: After Yukhei goes on a weekend drug binge with his boyfriend and his best friend, he gets sent away to his grandmother's to reform for the summer- the young man living with her is conveniently attractive.





	Worklace

**Author's Note:**

> Prequel to Macabre, which I highly recommend reading first, though this can stand alone it might spoil the other fic for you --> https://archiveofourown.org/works/14235960 enjoy :)

_ Worklace _

For at most twenty four hours, Wong Yukhei had existed in a place of marvelous excelsors and with parameters of boxed glass, that if a ruler were to be held up against his form it'd need but to strain and exceed the longevity of his skull's perseverance in regards to growth, how his cheek bones sloped in a manner which was treated as a tolerable sort of attractiveness. He hadn't been around to enjoy his three seconds of lime light of course, and could do little not to regret his lack of the bask in the glow and perhaps, attention. 

When he returned, his mother had smacked him on the back of the head so his teeth rattled and slopped about inside his mouth. Against his tongue, coins resonated in minute presses, metallic with something that predated blood.  _ Idiot _ , she'd said,  _ you fucking idiot. God, I hate you. _

Yukhei hadn't replied at the time. For the rest of his life, he wondered with misplaced idleness what might've been retained should he have said anything at all, and anything with any value, and anything with any reassurance of a boy who'd once been perceived as a rare holder of good intentions. They were in the sitting room then, with the tv turned up to max so his aunt hadn't the trouble of reading some offbeat subtitles. Never particularly troubled, she watched the distance between him and his mother and pulled her glass circlette of cashew nuts closer, the crunches amplified with her plastic gums. Night had struck and yet the curtains were wide open. In his peripherals, he thought he might've seen the dashes in a slothful sort of succession of a Man United flag beyond the porch. 

_ I hate you _ , his mother had said, weeping and not seeing what he was seeing, for it was rare for her to rear her head into a state of mental stability, and to see an etch or a dash beheld in a bigger picture. She retired to bed with haste. Through the scritchy voices of a soap actress on screen, Yukhei could make out the bare bones of a weeping retreat from her bedroom, the cries so bare that they resounded without break. 

His aunt crunched on her cashews without any sign of merciful reasoning, and then after a few moments of this were passed in relative pain, she held out the bowl to Yukhei. "You should pack," she said, seeing his eyes buoy twice before he took a handful and crushed them in his palms. The dust flumed outwards in the air, grey and flaked; treated by gravity with a manner of grace and adoration and a catch of flight benounced upon dirty feathers; this was it for the summer, then, to think that quite an unfamiliar beast must be beheaded by such mediocrity as a weekend long drug fest in Taeyong's car, with Johnny fucking around with his head in ways that made his dick hard and his smears of credible goodness  _ tarnished _ . With some misguided reasoning, he was under the impression that the badness of being a stoner was to be blamed on the drugs, but for him to continue on with any dignity at all it wouldn't make due to be gay- was he to blame every boy on the planet for pertaining this vague allure? Thus was the panic and the high of what should've been his 'wild kid' summer or whatever, like in shitty 90s movies, guillotined before sparks could fly. 

He packed as sparingly as he could, nails pinched into his thigh should he so much as fathom the idea of a night's sleep. 

 

Yukhei's grandmother had once been a stage actress regarded with an air of warm familiarity. Perhaps friendship, he'd heard from his late grandfather, eager to elaborate on the details of his show pony, but most definitely heavy handed in that 'nature of all suitors'. Then, pausing to add a number into his sudoku puzzle, he'd added that they were only possible suitors since his grandmother hadn't the capacity to love any man other than him, or so the tall tale befell. 

It went without saying that all that shimmered hadn't the preservation to shimmer for much longer, and to last through five years in the regime of a stage performer, mustened by the scent of borrowed perfume and post-recital flips of wine, was an impressive legacy to uphold above one's cranium when asking oneself why it couldn't be like the old times ever again, laced with success and blocked by  gold plating. The grandmother glooped away from the warm air, happily among virtue of some health condition. 

She stood in the door as Yukhei heard his mother's car drive away behind him. His parents hadn't so much as attempted to extend a word towards his grandmother; not even out of charity and goodwill- or god forbid- familial obligation. It had always astounded him that his mother should continue living beside herself(rather than affronted by herself) with such ongoing rudeness. It was blatant as it was missable, and while he walked up the garden path he thought he mightn't learn to live without the  _ option _ of seeing her. He supposed that in a way, he'd grown up with this apparent reliance on others, and maybe even an attachment, if he was feeling optimistic about the whole eternity thing. In any case, it was hard to walk with any sense of happiness towards the summer, and barring the excitement and ideas of what might occur, there seemed to be nothing left- the silver lining was that his mother didn't concuss him with her bore knuckles, a dozen imprints of her cheap, packet-bought rings, and that there was some signal if he walked up the hill that watched over the house, deep set in countryside marsh. He couldn't wait to call Johnny later, after his obligation of alerting Hyunjin towards his current state of aliveness was fulfilled. Sometimes, he thought that the average person would never understand the tiresomeness of having a boyfriend and a girlfriend. He was the only person he knew who had both. 

His grandmother looked at him with her vision quite obviously phasing in and out, and that was when he knew that he could commit arson and get away with it, as long as he remained on the cottage grounds to some foreseeable degree. It was speculated within the cousins militia that perhaps she had glass eyes by now, and that the smoke blackened them both beyond functional repair. Then it was speculated that she was one of those androids loitering about the forefront of the technology section on most conservative news sites, about stealing jobs and what not, all the ridiculous fear mongering in Yukhei's opinion- both in regards to the current occupational crisis(in that it occupied too much of his dismissal force) and the android thing, because he had an idea that his grandmother was simply blinding in that way that some old women had the patience to live through, without so much pity thrown to the ring by virtue of their rumoured lack of consciousness anyway. 

He felt pretty bad for her, if he was honest. He even hugged her at the door and felt the way her raggedy dressing gown scratched against his arms.

"Yukhei," she said, falling into the wise old woman stereotype by her tone; his name had been the only one of the cousins that she'd memorised. Since she knitted through the tv now, it would hard not to have the school photograph of him imprinted in one's brain over the past two days, the missing persons report excessive in its haughty voiced presenter. He expected her to mention either his mother, the weather, or what 'interesting' business she got up to when she was her age, but instead she turned so he could see the mites stringing out of the short, grey ringlets and licking at her neck. Her neck was thin and it gave the impression of being lined with raised velvet. The fillets of her hands were crunched into a millimeter of throwaway flesh along the bones, and when she closed three gold latches upon the door hinge after him, her nails grazed the surface in excess. "You've been bad, I hear."

"You wouldn't know the half of it," Yukhei said, hoping to get away with a laugh or even a quick inhale-exhale turn of the head combo. She stayed silent and padded off in her slippers, with no cardstock carved into the stoles- it seemed as alight as anything that she'd gotten ahold of them by some hotel's sewing kits and niceties. 

Yukhei hadn't known what to do, in the hall when alone. It was always with that odd feeling of being unaccompanied where perhaps, the company was a redundant label maker, that he made a day of bringing his kit bag up to the guest room. As far as he was, he could still hear the click as his grandmother ignited the tea-canister; the house was far too silent for its own good, for if there was a hum of electricity or swaddled, stalled humanity about the place it'd become a frightful thought that a ghost might appear before him, rather than a prelude to his death. 

There was someone in his room. He realised with a lurch, that a shadow was gliding through the slit of the door with extreme limbs of notable length. Then the door swung open and the light blocked in through the shaded window- a creature shorter than him, well built and jutted, and upon second- no, third glance- it became apparent that it was a young man who stood before him, bringing folds of sheets towards a long span of torso, broad but withholding from being quite masculine enough. Yukhei stared with openness of course, as it seemed to be the reasonable imagining all circumstances considered. 

"Don't mind me," the young man said, and moved past him as though he were limping.  This odd drought between his hamstrings and his brain, the jolt and swipes of a misstep replicated again and again, seamless through a course of misplaced intrigue. Yukhei  couldn't help but behold the odd walk more than the young man's face, as handsome as it was with careful consideration of values rooted in conventional wax, and how it scrubbed off the palms when reached for. Whatever could he be doing here, thorns sheathed within neutrality when it made due sense to act upon the mundane? "The sheets have been replaced."

Indeed, the sheets were replaced. Yukhei ran a hand along the fade printed posies on the duvet and felt their wilt. When he leaned a head back on the pillow, it jumped to imitate crispness and bring faith to its changer's words. He sat idle for too long in one place, and when he moved the drapes downstairs were drawn and his limbs were stapled and locked in uncomfortable lines, so that he were ripping the staples off when they moved, the moths clipped along his knees. Day one of the summer, after semi-graduation weekend, and he were chained up by shackle like a tiger fit for the extraction of bone marrow. He stirred on the bed and only felt a minor sense of guilt when he slipped his hand into his jeans, then his briefs and rubbed- almost as though his dick were to be treated with specimen wonder- and thought of Johnny's guns which were  _ crazy shredded _ for a seventeen year old who'd let their gym subscription cave under itself a year earlier, and ate dinner with his boyfriend every night by some grand exclusivity, and this dinner consisted of highly strung takeaway sessions shared between teenage boys with ghostly complexions and greasy skin, which really embodied their relationship- burning bright, preluding a lifetime of dread fast. 

When he came in his hand, he was in that entitled, hungry mood, and first detoured to the upstairs bathroom(which stank of potpourri and chemical driven photosynthesis) to wash the white streaks into the sink's metal throat, then felt lured downstairs by the smell of tv dinner concealed by microwave panes. In the kitchen, that was, by some force of old fashioned architecture, attached to a greyed slot of a dining room extravaganza, his grandmother stood over the kettle as it made the occasional worrying pang. Her dressing gown fanned out from her shoulders and appeared larger than any frock Yukhei had ever seen, nor any fashion corrugated jackets. He possessed the sense not to ask after food on sight. Instead, when she jankly cleared off to pick at her mashed slop, he dug through the cupboards for something with attributes skewed towards reasonable dryness upon the tongue. Leaned against the counter, he managed to devour an entire box of branflakes to his own horror. Johnny Seo, oh Johnny- a romance that had somehow surpassed the little bolt of affectionate reasoning which teenage boys had much of the brain room to grow into, inserted and installed within a bumble of nervosa, and the depths were almost unfounded for Yukhei- torn apart for a night and he'd weep, he knew it. In the seclusion of Taeyong's car, the wonderland and odd euphoria of the smoke dredges framing Johnny's face had been a lot to handle in levels of overtook thoughts and of course, hormones- ashamedly so. Yukhei was smitten, and had been for the past year of their courtship. Johnny returned after a summer spent in Chicago among tight knitted family their Junior year, with this American boy tan that hadn't faced generic stereotypical repulsion by bleach therapy when he'd propped himself into his first period seat, the white shirt and the shoes and the newfound height that lead mutual friends to joke about the use of heel lifts; it was an instant crush submerged in shallowness, then frothed about with recognition of something wonderful that took more than an arm, more than a dismembered one held without lag or weakness, to reach. 

That night as the willow trees by the lake shifted with simplistic mystique, Yukhei put on his bomber jacket that was so writhe with worness the lines exceeded the hinges of a human body, and went out into the darkness beyond the house with his phone clutched softly, in familiarity and in comfort. The flashlight highlighted so much rabbit shit on his way up the hill that he could hear the carrots trembling in crops far out of radius, and swerved around each one should he ruin his Nikes. On the hill, he called Johnny at  _ least _ fifty times, who didn't pick up. Perhaps filled with rage, he shot off a text to his girlfriend and then deleted his entire call log from Johnny, should he ever get the notion that Yukhei was about to wade through the relationship with one sided effort. He was used to the egg shells, to pussy footing around Johnny anyway. It would strengthen his wellbeing to indulge in a proper old tantrum, whispered for no one to hear. The moonlight sifted along the grass and about him, the trees fell to the paranoia that struck such an out of place chord within him that it unsettled for ages, the bile and what not resounding hollow, unbeknownst to him. 

Him and Johnny had ran away together for exactly one weekend that had the good nature to lure a divinity into its trap and let it go unnoticed; Yukhei's parents flitted off the land to valentine trip about some European replicas of heaven's wonder, and left alone to their own devices, Johnny and him hadn't the chewed hatred not to go through with their escapist fantasy. They'd borrowed Taeyong's car under the condition that it'd be returned reasonably intact and had travelled out to the coast line where all bodies of water were muddied with grasshoppers and mantises and various other insects. From the boat house, the ripples along the sea could be viewed with comfort. The surface reflected the sky and remained dark or slogged; the waves créping with shimmers. At night, it was so dark that flipped on its head it could surpass the night sky in replication of vastness, and Yukhei had felt that the football fish must be so enormous that their anglers were as big as the sun, if not bigger. He'd felt this nausea too then, this paranoia towards his surroundings. The sailboats looked like jagged teeth and the people looked like prisoners. 

He hadn't been alone back then.

Secluded on the hill, breath frosted in the heat, Yukhei flipped on the flashlight and bolted back to the old cottage house, the suddenness revolting in waves against each of his extremities. 

He thought at first that the figure that greeted him at the door might be a murderer risen above conventional means of horribleness, one with ass length shags of black hair ready to be picked and spun to cloth, face pale and unnatural and uncanny. However, the young man was saying, "you're up late," and thus it was the young man behind a shadow of reasonable doubt once again. He was dressed for a wedding; white, plaid in rifts of cotton among a field, the emblem of some sort of family crest stitched onto his breast pocket with fine embroidery thread, and when he turned to the kettle his shirt parachuted with salty air. "I couldn't imagine why. Though I suppose, that's what being young's like. I'll tell you now, that there's not much to escape to out there, so don't expect to go out with a bang."

"I was under the impression that they'd lift my corpse from the lake in a few days," Yukhei said, wondering why on earth this young guy was talking to him from beyond the plateaued grave. He paused where it might've made sense to leave the room and go back to bed, then stew about for the rest of the season with ideas about what might've happened, should he have gone down the attractive path. "Y'know, give my granny some time to remember I'm even meant to be here."

The young man laughed and poured the water into one mug, then stirred in some grain from the chamomile box. In the right sort of light, where interruptions hadn't been given the podium to bore into the cavities and contours from one side, it made sense to find him good looking, a harp rested beneath a forearm and all that- his eyes had a nice quality about them even though they seemed dark enough to be blinded with the mythical ash Yukhei's cousins had gone with great length to imprint upon everyone's memories. Whatever was he here for, in the stakes of a communal root through of earthly possessions, in an estate to be sold off to farmers when the grandmother died in her sleep, when he should be out among the rest of his kind, stirring on mattresses and lax with sex? Yukhei felt his insides frost; no American tan present. The prospect of its hypothetical existence and the implications that went with its fixture were too frightening to consider. "She's a lovely lady," the young man said, "and her grandson seems lovely too."

For a single pump of blood, Yukhei froze and then let the rigidness warm into his usual state again; he felt it, that his cheeks were as pale as they were moments before and would continue to let forth no tells of how  _ odd _ he really felt at such a statement. "Who are you?" he said as the young man placed(yes placed, not threw, with staggering levels of delicacy and care and overall gentleness) the used teaspoon in the sink's basin. 

"Kim Jungwoo," he said, and that was that. Kim Jungwoo underwent his first birthing before Wong Yukhei, the first debut of an identity and apparel. It was pretty the way titles suited him all at once; his hair fussed up and his wedding by the door for hope of regulated attendance, how Yukhei felt his fingers slit by the threading with discomfort and that chord struck wrong again and again and again and held to such means of piercing. "And you are?"

"Don't worry about me," Yukhei said, and closed the door behind him. 

It was nearing a week and still, Johnny hadn't made a great effort of motions to talk to him, nor given a signal that the emotions behind the lack of action were anything that Yukhei would find stellar- or failing that, reassuring. The days were passed in the lounge while his grandmother didn't break her neck to lie about her hospitality. Each hour, she'd pause her slump and stare at the tv as though it had offended her, then drawn Yukhei from the deck to ask about how many hours she'd have to wait for the soap opera to make its grand appearance. In the evening, he'd tell her with pity, much later on I'm afraid, then when she passed him a tv guide it'd be outlined by shows that had no business airing anymore. He'd consumed more half baked Korean variety than he felt reasonable for a teenage boy that was decidedly not paraplegic or living in a myriad of idol appearances. 

Johnny brought him great sorrow- this was a given, when one remembered that it was second love he was dealing with, and certainly the most shocking in regards to depth and foolishness and defensiveness and a temporary sense of conviction. Yukhei was far from being a man who worked well with his brain to use words, as a general rule to flatten out his thoughts until dispensable, but it was in the moments where he felt the cold lick at him from beneath his duvet, that he could with sincerity believe that his mother had been right about love. She'd said, it was great when it felt great and worthless otherwise. He'd maintained a dialogue with his girlfriend over the past few days, when he felt the sky was bright enough to venture outside the safety realm so there'd be no evening spirits to greet him. His girlfriend had cute mannerisms when she texted and catalogued abhorrent amounts of copy-paste emoticons, but it was expected of his internal organs that he mightn't feel the same about her. He didn't, of course. He was gay after all. As off putting as it felt, it wasn't a fact easily dismissed. In twenty years time, a wound would be feeding off the decay within him, engulfing his muscle and the tissue surrounding his bladder. 

Each time he asked, his grandmother was difficult with the subject of Jungwoo. She hadn't the wits about her to answer with what anyone would wish to hear, it seemed;  _ whoever are you talking about? _ she'd say,  _ I've never heard of this guy in my life. You kids these days, watching too many movies. The fiction takes over your brain after a while you know. It's the same with video games, and the same with books sometimes- but still, your granny can't resist reading Lee Minhyung, oh my! _ and then she'd cover her mouth with her hand, though Minhyung hadn't written a single scandalous sentence in his life and nothing to bring even the most old fashioned of ladies to such a conclusion. 

He was very sure that Jungwoo existed in some form, for if he hadn't the depths of Yukhei's sexual fantasies would prove impressive. Then, what would he be wanking off to at night to spite Johnny's arrogance decadence? Whose name would he mutter against the dry printed daisies on the duvet when he came? No, Jungwoo had done far too much to be a trick of the light; he frequented the kitchen at night and brewed unhealthy amounts of chamomile tea, then Yukhei would seize the promptness of his front to retreat to his room and perhaps play some bejeweled on his phone. He found it a calm way of living among the line pressed squalor, but hadn't made any reservations to carry on in its path. In the future, there would be the white picket fence and the soberness and the wife waiting for him, and it meant a great deal that he could tarnish himself as a teenager with some privacy, if he had the time and means to get away with it, before he might end up in the wrong arms. 

The wrong arms were shrouded in baggy material always, the hands smooth at the joints, raised at eye level as stuff was folded on the clothes horse, and Yukhei would watch with conviction of secrecy and think, good god Jungwoo could you not ditch the get up for once? Then, with some guilt and spite, Seo Johnny, you never had the figure to deserve me. These were both defense mechanisms that allowed Yukhei to curl up in his hedgehog ball on moan; he felt it was important that failing Johnny wasn't the bigger issue here. Sometimes before bedroom curfew as toothpaste froth dipped down his chin, he caught his front in the black reflected window and felt the consternation bloom, fulsome. It hadn't been the same Wong Yukhei as the one he'd become acquainted with. His eyes were rawer from exhaustion, the definite proof of a miss step in adolescence, the imprints of a beast clawed along his hollow cheeks- or rather, hollower than the usual defined aspects of it. 

In the end, it had been love. He was in love with Johnny. Weeks passed flicking cards at the framed script of a Robert Frost poem in his grandmother's drawing room, and not a word from Johnny. Yukhei had pulled the carp out stillborn, and gutted it with a need to rid it from sight, to renew every cell of himself that had functioned while Johnny had loved him so that seven years down the line, he couldn't say for certain he was the same person he'd once been and his body would materialise as the ship of theseus. Where had he gone wrong? Was he just too good in bed, that Johnny kept him around for that and nothing else? Had he turned ugly and crude? Was his voice grating with wear? Was his dick an unacceptable length? Were his limbs clunky? Had he perceived his face with the wrong objectivity? Was his mother right when she called him an idiot? He'd always been a bit dim, and had lacked common sense in accordance to popular opinion; a rare time where detached words proved correct. Maybe it was embarrassing to date someone as stupid as him, and maybe it had become an annoyance that he required the level of help he did with something so simple as Korean essay questions. 

With the time to reflect, it only made sense that he'd study himself well enough so as all the stuff that churned below the surface might hit the sunlight, blackened and shameful. It was July and he still couldn't sustain on his own. "It's a hard ask from a boy your age," Jungwoo said, stirring the broth. "Everyone just assumes you guys don't get the whole independence thing, or at least not fully, but I think it might be to your benefit. Here I am cooking you dinner for the sixth time in a row."

"You're too nice," Yukhei sniffed. In the kitchen at night, the radiator padded off until there was no heat to be found from anywhere but duck skin as it crackled in the oven, drips of marinade splotching through and casserole dishes flooded with oil. He'd taken to wearing his grandmother's dressing gowns as a precautionary measure- they'd been packaged, perhaps, as hospital scrubs to be treaded about in when the slip in the shower called for it, but she was a frugal lady who'd learned the trade secrets through her roles, on how to survive on nothing but a tv license and roast dinner coupons for a month straight. "It was well more than six times, and I know you know it too."

When they had dinner, Jungwoo would rest his elbows on the table despite the initial assumption that it was out of line to maintain pure blood, and he didn't excel in all facets of a chivalrous life- he swore on the odd occasion, watched Yukhei eat and varnished his words with condescension often, pompous but level headed enough(and possibly, lacking in self contemplation enough) to get away with it in a mirrored paragon. He never ate at the same time as Yukhei but was savvy enough with his conversational flow that it seemed appropriate, when the leather was broken in just right by his injectures. Yukhei would eat some variation of boiled vegetables and remind himself that whatever he'd say, Jungwoo would have some sort of introspective comment on that simply  _ must  _ be wisdomed into the mind of a troubled youth, despite the fact that Jungwoo was a deluxe cardheld youth himself, though he didn't reek of trouble in such a way that stood out on a white background. Afterwards, Yukhei would put his dish out and bid Jungwoo goodnight and steal a linger at Jungwoo as he washed the plate, at those smooth joints down to how his knuckles remained static in hives, and then he'd close the door and flit upstairs and that'd be the end of it. Routine, however strangely circumstantial. Even nudists had their routines; all sorts of weird people ran through the same weird habits every day, or so he told himself. It didn't have to be telling that the bulbs of a friendship had been dropped between him and this intruder of his grandmother's life, moss silver and invisible, even when held up to a harsh light. 

 

Old lady Wong had been flaunting this blind item about a visitor all day, to arrive on premises when the sun was sort of down but not quite, and to leave when the roads weren't too dark that skulls would be split. Yukhei had no excitement for this. Still, he lent a hand in the cleaning wherever piteous and polite and dusty. In the de facto dining room, he'd uncovered an album of childhood, scrawled pictograms with his mother's name scribbled on the dead center of each page, and had delighted at how much better he was at drawing stick men than her. There was mild comfort about having an aptitude for it, however false or insignificant in something so razored as the grand scheme of his  _ life _ . The guest arrived an hour late and during this time, his grandmother curled her ringlets before the tv. Whenever the baton swabbed against her skin it'd sizzle and crackle with the detonation of blood pumped polystyrene, but she never seemed to notice the pain at all- let alone the unsettle the noise inflicted upon the room, Jungwoo training his eyes on her from the upright armchair. A chubby girl on tv called another girl an idiot. Reality flicks seemed to be a budding genre and Yukhei couldn't find it in him to be annoyed about it. Really, he was calm and collected with the prospect of dramatics upping the ante, since all the shows he watched were soapy and crushed to chalk as of late. 

Jungwoo, who had watched his grandmother for the entire hour, perhaps, was quick on his feet when the doorbell rang. Yukhei possessed no indignation to follow him and thus lounged with his argyle socks up on the glass table top. When it was sunny, all the shadows stretched through the pane and along the sitting room carpet, sometimes boring but often sinister. "Ms. Wong," he heard when he leaned closer to the door, from the mouth of his object of all lone sexual misdoings, Jungwoo addressing a fellow human being with the stilts to be overcome lowered in intimidation. "Come in- she's through the left door there, in the sitting room."

Louder, Yukhei's mother said, "of course. I could hear that bloody tv from a mile away-" he'd known since he was eight years old when his mother had grilled a woman in front of an entire restaurant for giving her a dirty look, that she would continue with her reserved rude tone for the next ten years of her life the smoking alluded to. The fabric had been laid out by the doctor; if she didn't give up her senseless addictions a reaper should infest her son's mind. There weren't the visuals for the childhood trauma to bloom from, however, and thus Yukhei wasn't inclined to wonder about black coats and scythes all that often, at the foot of his bed, sympathetic with the bore and the drawl of another cradle slip of the carpet. "Yukhei," she said when she'd stepped in through the door, the tips of Jungwoo's house slippers following her. It was rather earnest of her in the way of a father. Her work outfit was worn out and tired about her disgustingly long hair- straight and sectioned off when trimmed by the meter. Once on a communal accompaniment to the hairdressers with last month's Vogue mag spread across his lap(if he ever had the balls to come out, his mother might claim she regretted ever letting him indulge in such feminine practices) he'd overheard the stylists joke about her supposed resemblance with this Sadoko girl from The Ring, which he had yet to see at that point. "I'm here to check up on you."

"It'd be easier to check up on me if I was at home," Yukhei said, knowingly gathering himself up both in the brain and along the shag carpet. She'd want a private discourse with him soon, followed by one of her iconic guilt trips that expired well before the words had to be said in most cases, as Yukhei had always been quite susceptible to feeling guilty wherever unfit. "It'd save you a drive and all. You should consider it, really."

"You're still an idiot I see," she sighed and put her hand on her hip, cliche as ever. In the dining room, there were three coals placed on the furnace's grill dish without ever having been placed there at all; another one of Jungwoo's guardian activities as the angel investor of a comfortable, lakeside livelihood, hopes to rear some cheeriness into the inherent depression of a cottage deemed old and spiritually uninhabited enough. It was hard not to feel looked after when he was scampering about the place, which only made it stranger that after the required micro analysis of his own situation, Yukhei might find someone within Jungwoo's archetype so endearing and beneath different circumstances, it was hard not to think that he'd fall in love with him. He wondered when they sat out on the patio crushing diet sweeteners, how it'd all transpire if only Jungwoo hadn't his offputting limp or his assumed private school childhood. 

Yukhei's mother boiled the kettle and gnawed at her shellac nails through its shriek. The steam frosted the window, and as the light shifted it gave the impression of being some sort of snow. "Well," she said, "I know it's not ideal, but I hope you aren't suicidal out here."

Yukhei laughed and assisted with the prep, though it required golden carry on to make it to his mother's good books so there was little to no point. "You shouldn't have dumped me so close to a lake- they wouldn't find my body for weeks, and then you'd be able to file a missing person report that's actually  _ valid _ ," he said, "not some bullshit about a night without a phone call or whatever. I know this might be hard to believe but even Taeil's allowed on slumber parties at age seventeen."

"Taeil's different- he was raised properly," she said, then a shadow passed beneath the bone of her face, notched into the skull; this greyness by and large consisting of regret, maybe even guilt should empathy strike her as a passing fad to be reigned by the horns at any point. Throughout their time in acknowledgement of one another, she'd never displayed such wondrous traits to the high brows of the public and so Yukhei knew he couldn't expect anything otherwise. Jungwoo had said that this wasn't normal, but then admitted that he wouldn't be the type to carve out contextual normalness in the first place- however, when asked no elaboration upon his statement was put forth. "I'm sorry you're here, but it's for your own good as much as mine. It's stressful having you around when you can just carry on all the time, thinking you can do whatever you want even though you still live under  _ my _ -" she paused and sipped her tea, though Yukhei felt through the ceramic how her tongue must've been scorched. "Your aunt was shocked. I won't be made to feel like a shameful mother."

"Why here?"

She seemed to check if he was joking or not, then forked some hair behind her shoulder. Outside, a cicada began to rumble in its tanned shell with its blood appearing black, the tree skin drying in the harsh sunlight. Tomorrow, all the water in the lake might be evaporated and a dozen forgotten corpses will applaud the scenery from their bone marrow. "I'm not so sure now, I'm worried you might be lonely," she admitted. 

"Well obviously," Yukhei said, rolling his eyes so they blotched- though if he were honest, the loneliness had grown so overbearing that its presence was ignorable by means of spite, but when the water thinned out from its gush the sensibility of death began to realise with ease, incarnated among a godly light and an outstretched hand that hadn't needed to bear any resemblance to Johnny's yet did so anyway, a flood of dismay and a rush of blood to the flat top of his head that his boyfriend would only care about him through drasticity. Not that he'd succumb to open coffins to expand an audience; he lived, but sometimes the cottage's acute emptiness screamed out to him that it wasn't hard to assume another state of being, should he so much as walk far enough without stopping. "All I've got is some random guy and my blind granny who always forgets I'm even here."

"Jungwoo's nice," she said. "He's helped your grandmother so much, you should feel indebted. 'Some random guy'- how disrespectful! Even your aunt won't acknowledge his work!"

"I don't... I don't see why not."

It was a breaking moment; the air fanned out with the explicit nervosa of making it hard to breathe, and Yukhei felt this tug at his collar from the back that hadn't the weight to get his head decapitated by pain and neck broken down to a pulp; cows all over South Korea sat down in anticipation of the eye of the storm to flit above an entire body of land and all the water off its back too, revelations preparing a seat at the table, cloth bloodied red. "You know how conservative she can be about these things. All of your relatives- technophobes, the lot of them. It's a wonder I'm not shunning his existence for stealing our jobs. Not like we could afford much else, and yet no one's happy with him or it or whatever they say."

Yukhei felt his eyes widen, brows curve on the skin and lashes influenced by the shift to stab outwards. The handle shattered in his fist and the red leaked through his fingers, embedded crust along the nails that wouldn't clear for days it seemed, perhaps weeks, perhaps until his return to form next semester when the repertoire wouldn't make due with a neck slit with scar tissue and thus made ugly, clawing ongoing until a demise or a rebirth or the means to make due with being so very, very alone. 

 

That night, he drew the blinds and refused to go downstairs despite Jungwoo's incessant pleas for him to eat. Helper bots had to cook, but Yukhei wanted to limit himself out of the graces of a machine he'd once viewed as a lone companion- the ceiling was sparse and grey with dust, the backbones of germs dotted along its folds. Viewing it until daytime, the unrest of being the only functioning soul in his solitary confinement brought Yukhei to great heights of fear for his well being. Loneliness was a killer best shielded by denial but Jungwoo's mechanical limp was too prevalent to ignore. 

  
  
  
  
  


_ Johnny, might you forgive my faults before I suffocate? _

**Author's Note:**

> <3 <3 <3 <3


End file.
